Network communication technologies on the allow users with common interests to collaborate, share files, chat with one another, multi-cast audio and video for presentations and group meetings, and engage in multi-player gaming. Most network communication and formation takes place in a server-centric environment or a peer-to-peer environment. In a server-centric environment all communication flows to or through large central servers to which individuals may connect to join and participate in the group. Peer-to-peer technologies enable users to contact one another in a serverless environment. However, in many cases a client is access-protected behind a firewall (e.g., personal, network or enterprise) which causes problems when initiating incoming connections. Although firewalls may be more easily traversed if only one client is access-protected, firewall traversal between two access-protected clients is difficult even under an administrator's control. However, this problem may be solved by using community relay nodes, also referred to as supernodes.
A community relay node may be a computer or server that is not access-protected and may easily accept incoming communications from a transmitting client, and route the communication to the receiving client. The community relay node may thereby relay communications between two access-protected clients. The community relay node may be any computer or server with sufficient resources (e.g., quality of service) to relay the communications between access-protected clients. A client that wants to communicate with another client may request a community relay node to assist with the communication. However, a requesting client does not always know which computers/servers are community relay nodes. Known community relay nodes may also become unavailable, which may not be known by the requesting client. As such, a requesting client may encounter problems discovering a community relay node. Further, the community relay node required by a requesting client may depend on the communication protocol type being requested (e.g., secure sockets layer, user datagram protocol, etc.), thereby further causing difficulty in finding a suitable community relay node.